- 54 of 200
- Technical SEO & Indexability
- Meta Tags & Heading Hierarchy
- Medium
Short answer: Google doesn't limit meta description length, but it trims long snippets to fit the screen. Check 54 passes descriptions of 80 to 170 characters and warns outside that, suggesting 120 to 160. Like the title range in check 52, that's our rule of thumb. A short description may say too little, and a long one may be cut before its point.
What Crawl Audit checks
- Pass: 80 to 170 characters, counted after trimming spaces at each end.
- Warning: shorter than 80 or longer than 170, with the length shown.
- Fail: no description to measure (check 53).
What Google says
"There's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width."
Other tools' numbers
- Shopify: "It's recommended that 160 characters is used in the description."
- Wix: "between 50-160 characters long".
- Squarespace: "Keep the text between 50-300 characters", with a hard limit of 400.
They don't agree, and none is a Google rule. Put the most useful words first, so the point survives wherever it's cut.
On devmarde.com
On 3 October our homepage description was 200 characters, and 39 of our first 50 check explainers ran over 170, so all of them got this warning. We cut them the same day, to between 120 and 160.
Where to edit it on your platform is in check 53.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Control your snippets in search results (updated 20 April 2026), checked 3 October 2026.
- Shopify, Adding keywords; Wix, Adding SEO title tags and meta descriptions; Squarespace, Adding SEO descriptions.
See how your site does on every check.
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